Norfolk police signs up Fujitsu for data warehouse project

Norfolk Constabulary has signed up Fujitsu to deliver an operational data warehouse that will allow data within the police force to be combined and linked in one repository.

Computerworld UK reporter
September 13, 2007

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Norfolk Constabulary has signed up Fujitsu to deliver an operational data warehouse that will allow data within the police force to be combined and linked in one repository.

The data warehouse should give the force more flexibility and prove more cost effective than supplying data returns to the Home Office via the National Management Information System (NMIS) – an analytics platform developed by Northgate that is available to all 43 police forces.

The data warehouse is also expected to be more practical to front line policing by allowing the force to carry out many activities that are not possible with its existing arrangements.

Christine Thompson, information management business manager at Norfolk Constabulary, said the force had opted for Fujitsu because it “has access to more resources than the competition and put together the most persuasive tender document.”

Under the deal, Fujitsu will work with its partners, SAS Software and Amadeus Software, to combat the common range of problems caused by multiple information systems with different collection and storage techniques.

In the first phase, Norfolk Constabulary has already been able to bring together information from its crime and HR systems in order to improve its ability to provide annual Home Office Data Returns. Future phases will enable the force to make links between external events such as economic trends and population movements to help to predict patterns of crime.

Fujitsu said its strategy in its work in data warehousing with police forces in the UK was to extract important data from the many disparate information systems used by individual police forces in order to consolidate and improve its quality. This would, it said, improve forces’ ability to respond to the national policing requirements that emerged from the Bichard inquiry – the independent inquiry, established in 2003, which examined the manner in which the police handled the intelligence surrounding the Soham murders.

Andy Sowden, head of police business at Fujitsu Services, said deal with Norfolk was “an important project for us and one which will provide Norfolk Constabulary with a framework that will be able to cope with continued change – both at a local and a national level – and the many information requirements that will come their way in the future.”